Bear’s childhood setting matched Matthew’s, but his perspective, Bear said on Zoom, was almost perfectly “opposite.” “For him, he’s coming from privilege, and some of that privilege is being taken away, because if I wasn’t around, he would live basically in a white world,” Bear said. “For me it was a huge step up. I’m coming at it with a lot more gratitude.”
Now, Bear is an architectural engineer in North Carolina, and though the two are in steady touch, there are profound omissions, a certain kind of “chasm” Matthew feels between them. “We’re brothers but we’re not like other kinds of brothers,” he said. Instead, he feels that there’s a connection between Bear and Eddie that he himself — “kin not skin”— is excluded from.
There is a tragedy at the core of this book, a rupture that threatens to unravel them all. The story of his family, Matthew knows, defies neat conclusions. He knows that it was white privilege that empowered his parents to summon children from all over the world to fulfill their dream of the “futuristic family unit.” And yet, despite the losses and failures, “I am who am I because I am stitched into this family,” he said. “I can’t be ambivalent about the sets of decisions that brought them into my life because I love them too much.”
That same sense of ambiguity carries over into other aspects of Guterl’s life, and his story. His wife Sandi, herself from a multicultural background, teases him, wondering whether she would have married him if he had just been a white guy from “a garden variety cookie cutter white family,” as he puts it. But her question is never quite answered — or even, perhaps, answerable.
On a chilly Sunday afternoon, 10 days before publication, he called his siblings to make sure that, having now read the book, this probing examination of their own childhoods, they were still OK with him, their brother, the narrator. Despite a few disagreements, they told him they were. “We have not really as a family talked much about all this,” Guterl said. “So the book is an occasion for us to begin that conversation, too.”
